Champagne

A New York City hotel is hoping to help Phillies fans drown their sorrows if the Phillies lose World Series games at Yankee Stadium. Hotel Indigo NYC Chelsea, on West 28th St., announced a "Drown Your Sorrows" promotion. If you book a room for the night of any World Series game at Yankee Stadium, present your ticket stub and a valid drivers' license to prove you live in the city of Philadelphia and that you are 21 or over, and you'll receive a complimentary bottle of Perrier-Jouet champagne.

Team Canada's victory parade, alas, will not go up Broad Street. Brian Propp and Rick Tocchet were feted this morning in civic ceremonies from their coach seats on a 9 a.m. flight home. But seeing the two Flyers curled up together in a relatively quiet corner of the champagne-soaked locker room, passing a bottle after winning the Canada Cup last night, was very much a Philadelphia moment. Propp has been to the Stanley Cup finals three times in his eight Flyer seasons and Tocchet twice in his three.

The television lights had already been hung from the ceiling of the Pirates' clubhouse. The champagne was chilled. Pittsburgh wouldn't celebrate this night, though. The Atlanta Braves won, 1-0, to extend the National League Championship Series to a seventh and final game. And while the Pirates' room was subdued, the more noticeable emotion was something quite different and a little unexpected. Player after player talked about how much fun it has been to play in a series in which so many games have been decided by the slimmest of margins.

Allez la France! As the world knows, France beat Brazil, 3-0, to win soccer's World Cup on Sunday. From Calais to Toulouse, from Brest to Grenoble, millions of French are brachiating and jubilating. All this, and Bastille Day, too. Quite a frisson for the French Fourth of July. Some are calling this victory the greatest thing to happen in France since liberation from the Nazis in 1944. Hyperbole? Name something really terrific that has happened to France lately. We'll wait.

The way local residents carried on about Britain's royal wedding yesterday, you might have thought Prince Andrew had married the daughter of a Philadelphia bricklayer. From dawn until dark, area Anglophiles celebrated the marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, now the Duke and Duchess of York. There was champagne at breakfast, champagne at lunch, champagne in the evening. The Palace Hotel imported Buckingham Palace guards and blasted a tape recording of the Westminster Abbey bells over its outdoor loudspeakers; the Dickens Inn offered a "Royal Wedding Cocktail," and the English-Speaking Union re-enacted the wedding with a mystery bride.

Remember those effervescent eves of yesteryear when we'd toast the new year with out-of-season strawberries drowning in champagne? How quaint. Auld Lang Syners are now more likely to trade strawberries for strawberry liqueur. Or spike their champagne with plum-flavored vodka, strawberry-infused rum, Oprah's favorite pomegranate liqueur, or any number of libations from around the world. "There's been an explosion of customer interest in liqueurs to add to sparkling wines," says Robert Peters, a consultant at the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's Wine and Spirits Shop in Ardmore.

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, a California vintner by avocation, is making Americans an offer he hopes they won't refuse: He's asking them to drink his champagne out of cans. The new bubbly - named Sofia, after Coppola's moviemaking daughter - comes in individual servings of about six ounces. It's offered in a demure raspberry-color, plastic-lined can with a straw attached to the side, just like Juicy Juice. It sells for $5 a pop - or $20 for a four-pack, which comes packaged in a hexagonal foil carton, also raspberry in color, with circles like champagne bubbles cut out of its sides.

The real Broad Brush finally showed up on the race track last night. Unlike the raucous colt who bolted in the Pennsylvania Derby and still won, this Broad Brush ran straight and true in last night's $500,000 Meadowlands Cup at the East Rutherford, N.J., track. He took the lead from Peruvian pace-setter Lutz on the Meadowlands Racetrack's backstretch and opened up through the stretch under Angel Cordero Jr. to win by 3 3/4 lengths. In a blanket finish behind Robert Meyerhoff's 3-year-old, Skip Trial finished second, a nose ahead of Brooklyn Handicap winner Little Missouri.

Joy took hold of Tina Bannister. "Ooh, ooh," she said as she leaned forward in the wide leather seat of her chair, squeezed her hands into fists and hammered on the air as her feet madly tapped the soft green carpet. It was a home-run kind of day for Bannister, who has worked for 27 1/2 years at the Naval Aviation Supply Office in the Northeast. The assistant accountant had just watched a federal panel resoundingly reject a Pentagon recommendation to move the office to Mechanicsburg, Pa. She was among more than 100 workers, politicians and reporters who gathered yesterday in front of an 18-inch TV set in the Mayor's Reception Room at City Hall.

Stories about Winston Churchill's fondness for food and drink are legendary, but easily misunderstood, according to a new book by Cita Stelzer called Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table . There was the time in 1931, when he was being treated at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City after being hit by a car. He asked his doctor for the following Prohibition-era "prescription": "This is to certify that the post-accident convalescence...

Buzz: Hey Marnie, what's the deal with all the fake wine out there? Marnie: I have no clue, Buzz. I've never heard of such a thing. Buzz: Well, they had stacks of the stuff at the store yesterday. When I asked a clerk where they kept the champagne, he showed me a shelf of hoity-toity French stuff for $40 a bottle. I said that was too pricey for me, and was going to grab a cheaper one, but he said it wasn't "real" champagne. You'd think the labels would say "artificial wine," but I couldn't even find a list of ingredients.

Milton Garonzik, 96, of Center City, a retired business owner, died Monday, Sept. 12, at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Garonzik owned and operated United Army Navy Surplus on South Street. In 1970, he opened Northeast Army Navy Surplus in a shopping center in the Northeast. His wife, Bernice Kohn Garonzik, joined him in the new venture. With her added business acumen, including her realization that young people enjoyed wearing old Army jackets, the business flourished, their daughter, Sara Garonzik, said.

LOS ANGELES - Norma Zimmer, the "Champagne Lady" of TV's "The Lawrence Welk Show" and a studio singer who worked with Frank Sinatra and other pop stars, has died. She was 87. Zimmer died peacefully Tuesday at her Brea, Calif., home, Welk's son, Larry, said yesterday. Larry Welk didn't know the cause of death but said that Zimmer had been living an active life in recent years. "She was one of the most gracious, likable people that anyone could ever meet," he said. "The other people on the show, to this day, just respect and love her. " Zimmer performed on Welk's network show and later his syndicated show from 1960 to 1982 as the "Champagne Lady," the title Welk traditionally gave to his orchestra's lead female singer.

BUFFALO - Moments after Sabres coach Lindy Ruff called for Mike Richards to be suspended for Game 7 tomorrow night, I found Flyers chairman Ed Snider sitting alone in the team's dressing room, orange socks matching his orange tie, reading from a scoresheet. "Oh," Snider said, with a wry smirk, "is he whining again?" Well, Ruff wasn't exactly singing Shuffle Off to - or in this case from - Buffalo after yesterday's 5-4 overtime loss forced a Game 7. The smirk Ruff wore after Richards complained about his team "getting away with murder" following the chippiness of Game 4 was now a somber monotone as he reeled off a list of the wounded on his team, from scorer Jason Pominville to defenseman Andrej Sekera to, now, Tim Connolly, who was rammed into the boards headfirst from behind by Richards with a little over 6 minutes left in the second period.

BRYANT McKINNIE, the Minnesota Vikings' Pro Bowl offensive lineman, has been putting emphasis on "offensive" lately. The Woodbury, N.J., native was chosen for last year's Pro Bowl in Miami but failed to show up for the last two practices and was kicked off the NFC squad. This weekend, news comes out of Hollywood, by way of TMZ.com, that McKinnie was attending a celebrity party around LA with the NBA All-Star Game in town and dropped $100,000 on a bar bill. Unlike Pacman Jones in 2007 at NBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas, three people weren't shot and McKinnie didn't make it rain.

SAN FRANCISCO - The nice thing about your hometown team winning a championship is that you can retreat inside your home when it gets too crazy. The bad thing about being in someone else's hometown when it wins a championship is that your home is in the middle of crazy. Such was the plight of the traveler attempting to return to his hotel after viewing Game 5 of the World Series at the Civic Center Plaza on Monday night. Among the hazards to maneuver around were, in no particular order, popping champagne bottles, excited panhandlers, large bonfires in the middle of intersections, excited panhandlers, second-hand marijuana smoke, aggressive offers to partake in firsthand marijuana smoke, increasingly aggressive and excited panhandlers, much, much more secondhand marijuana smoke, and several men trying to kiss you. "Tonight, everybody in San Francisco is gay," one such man screamed as he danced past the bonfire with a champagne bottle in one hand and something lit in the other.

NOW THIS is cool. After former Phillies ace Cliff Lee and the Rangers dispatched the host Rays on Tuesday night, the celebration was on full-blast in the visitors' locker room as players donned goggles and toasted the team's first-ever playoff series win ? with ginger ale. The non-alcoholic fervor was out of respect for slugger Josh Hamilton, who wrestled with alcohol and drug addiction during the early part of his professional career. Hamilton has been clean and sober for years now, but has been tempted to relapse, as explored in a recent expose on the HBO sports magazine show "Real Sports.

CINCINNATI - The thrill isn't gone, even if the suspense is, and even if the novelty of October baseball in Philadelphia is a distant memory. The Phillies have turned series clinches into routine events. This is a franchise with an annual champagne budget that would impress Kanye West. Two years ago, you were pinching yourself after the Phillies beat Milwaukee in the first round and then took out the Dodgers in five games to go to the World Series. This year, the only real question was who the Phillies will face in the National League Championship Series.

CINCINNATI - The thrill isn't gone, even if the suspense is, and even if the novelty of October baseball in Philadelphia is a distant memory. The Phillies have turned series clinches into routine events. This is a franchise with an annual champagne budget that would impress Kanye West. Two years ago, you were pinching yourself after the Phillies beat Milwaukee in the first round and then took out the Dodgers in five games to go to the World Series. This year, the only real question was who the Phillies will face in the National League Championship Series.